Ok - first let me apologize for the awkward title. I know what I want, but I'm having a hard time describing it, much less finding it.

This is what I want. A customer asks for a half mushroom/half sausage pie. What type of guide/overlay is there to put on the raw pie to ensure the sausage stays on the sausage side and the mushrooms stay on the mushroom side and they don't overlap in the middle.

Get what I'm saying? Good. Let's move on to what I'd REALLY like.

Same concept, but a person orders an 8 slice pie and wants it half mushroom and the other half FOUR DIFFERENT SLICES: a - roasted peppers, b - extra cheese, c - sausage and d - onions.

Again, is there a guide out there that I can use to perfectly portion out multiple different toppings on the same pie.

I've never seen or heard of one, but my experience has been that even though you think you have distributed your topping well, they seem to migrate a bit while cooking. The melting of the cheese seems to enable things to slide while cooking, so even if you started out with a perfectly divided pizza, the finished product may not yield a perfect finished product. I'll be interested to hear what others have to say.

Wow... at that point, it seems easier to 'build' one out of cooked slices, and do a group reheat. Are they paying enough to bother creating a better solution? Maybe lay (or pipe/gun?) on spokes of some universally-accepted veg or paste topping, and fill in between?

Andrew: Have you thought about making pies in advance of various toppings and then you could put together a pie so to speak from the various finished pies. Right now about 80% of our business is by the slice. We make most of the pies in advance of our rush period (3 back to back 40 minute school lunches) and then reheat them on 16" or 18" pizza pans(depending on how many slices are ordered at a time) to keep the deck from getting all gunked up. We cook the pies direct on the stones and the reheats in the pans come out great IMO. We only offer cheese and pepperoni pies so the combination of toppings per pizza are not there like you might have with various toppings. Walter

scott123

First, you find a metal shop with a laser cutter and you fashion something like this out of either aluminum or stainless sheet. The two pieces screw together and the one half circle rotates against the other, creating any size opening from half a slice to half a pie.

scott123

A less complicated, more wasteful approach would be paper templates. Take parchment paper and cut out 1/2 slice, 1 slice and 1/4 pie openings. You could use a fold and cut technique like they use for paper snowflakes, or fashion a template out of wood and use that for cutting through a bunch of papers with a box cutter.

In theory, depending on your health inspector, you probably could keep using them until they got really dirty. One other option that came to me would be to cut the templates out of clear plastic- like, say, a 3 liter bottle.

scott123

Note, with both these ideas, you'd use the template for a slice, then either rotate it for the next slice/portion of the pie or grab another template- you top only one 'quadrant' at a time. t's going to tack on a lot of additional time for topping, but, you will get clearly defined toppings with no overlap.

I'd just do a hoop, higher than your undressed skin, with wires across the diameter to mark out the slices. You'd add sauce (and maybe cheese), then drop the hoop over the skin and finish dressing the slices marked off by the wires. It wouldn't mitigate topping migration, but it would be an easy-to-clean visual guide. The wires shouldn't gunk up too badly, and your local craftsman could make a hoop out of rattan or any thin wood.

I still like the idea of reheating a 'fabricated' multi-slice pie, though.

scott123

I still like the idea of reheating a 'fabricated' multi-slice pie, though.

For NY pizza, there is an unwritten contract between the customer and the owner that when the customer orders a whole pie, they get a freshly baked product. On the East coast, this unwritten rule is pretty well adhered to, but you do find a few shops in California who don't seem to know any better.

While Andrew's customers, in that part of the world, are not aware of this rule, as a New Yorker, I don't think he could, in good conscience, serve someone a pre-baked pizza when a whole pie is ordered.

Some great replies - I really appreciate people taking time out and posting.

I was remiss in not explaining the root problem that instigated my post. We have 9 different 18" pies - from plain cheese to the Tony Soprano which has 3 meats on it. Five of the 9 make up 70% of the slice orders, so when we have 2 slices left of those, we make another whole pie for slices. But the other 4 pies don't sell quite as well, so in order to keep them "fresher" we do half and halves - like half plain and half Hawaiian. What we don't want is one half to be larger than the other half because it effects the slice sizes (obviously). Finding the exact center of an 18" pie is not so easy when done with the naked eye - and you don't realize it until it's too late.

I think I came up with a simple fix with alligator clips and string - I'm able to do this because we start the pies off on screens. Sure, I can (usually) get an 18" pie off a wooden peel and maintain (mostly) a perfect circle, but it's hard to do everytime and almost impossible for the guys I'm training - so screens are part of the process. Probably nothing pisses me off more than getting a "small" slice off a badly cut/dressed pie - because I know for every small slice their is a partner "big" slice that someone bought for the same price.

All to say, I want to make perfect slices whether it's from a whole Tony Soprano or a half Bianco half wild mushroom.

Andrew: It sounds like you got it covered. It is amazing the gadgets that people invent. I am almost 60 and of the old NYC/NJ school- lots of uneven slicing, not perfectly round pies, only a few topping choices.... I guess I will never be a cutting edge guy Seriously, you have accomplished an amazing thing with bringing in a foreign food to a non english speaking country. My hat is off to you! Walter

Andrew: It sounds like you got it covered. It is amazing the gadgets that people invent. I am almost 60 and of the old NYC/NJ school- lots of uneven slicing, not perfectly round pies, only a few topping choices.... I guess I will never be a cutting edge guy Seriously, you have accomplished an amazing thing with bringing in a foreign food to a non english speaking country. My hat is off to you! Walter

So nice of you to say, Walter. Malaysia used to be a British Colony, so usually they speak decent English in addition to Malay. Thank goodness, because that might have been the breaking point during the tough times!

For NY pizza, there is an unwritten contract between the customer and the owner that when the customer orders a whole pie, they get a freshly baked product. On the East coast, this unwritten rule is pretty well adhered to, but you do find a few shops in California who don't seem to know any better.

While Andrew's customers, in that part of the world, are not aware of this rule, as a New Yorker, I don't think he could, in good conscience, serve someone a pre-baked pizza when a whole pie is ordered.